Tags: Educopia Institute

This white paper summarizes the Dodging the Memory Hole 2016: Saving online news event, with overviews of the panels and presentations, and projects produced by groups at the conference as well as student scholarship recipients.

The next Dodging the Memory Hole: Saving Online News forum will be held Nov. 15-16 at the Internet Archive in San Francisco. Your participation in DTMH 2017 will advance the exchange of knowledge of digital preservation.

Fourteen graduate students from academic institutions across the U.S. have been selected to receive funding assistance to attend a conference next month where they will take active steps toward preserving digital news.

The expense of digital preservation for the news producer will vary depending on how much of the effort is managed in-house. By collaborating with those who already have the infrastructure, the cost to news agencies could be very little indeed.

Most recent news content resides in the back rooms and basements of news agencies across the country. It’s scattered through various forms of media, in all kinds of formats, and often with little organization, management or care.

Journalists are dependent upon access to back files for research and context, but those back files may no longer be there. Almost all news content created in the U.S. today is digital, but digital content is even more fragile than print.

Edward McCain is digital curator of journalism at the Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute and University of Missouri Libraries. Dr. Katherine Skinner is the executive director of the Educopia Institute.